Thursday, October 29, 2015

BER 29, 2015

Ed here: Fine as Fran Lebowitz's piece on John O'Hara is I can't agree with her that O'Hara was Fitzgerald's equal. He wasn't nearly as good a stylist, he lacked the range of skills Fitzgerald brought to the page and his work rarely had the echoes found in even some of Fitzgerald's magazine stories. But how O'Hara has slipped from view, I dunno. His gifts were extraordinary. He understood America's class system in a way not even Fitzgerald did and despite his braggadocio he did indeed get his time and his generation down without peer. He can still move and delight me over and over; shabby as some of his bestsellers might have been his enormous body of work belongs on the same shelf as Steinbeck, with Appointment in Samarra its masterpiece.

Born in 1905 in Pennsylvania coal country, the son of a small-town doctor, John O’Hara leapt to prominence with his first novel, Appointment in Samarra (1934), about the downfall of a car dealer in the fictional town of Gibbsville, Pa. With his second novel, BUtterfield 8 (1935), O’Hara turned his sights on Manhattan and produced one of the great novels of New York in the Depression. For the next three decades, his fiction shuttled back and forth between Gibbsville and New York. Many of his short stories have stood the test of time, but as a novelist he never surpassed his first efforts. His novels of the mid-thirties are his classics, and they deserve to be much more famous than they are.

According to Fran Lebowitz, O’Hara is underrated “because every single person who knew him hated him.” This is an exaggeration, as O’Hara’s biographers (most notably Geoffrey Wolff) have shown, but he could be unpleasant, and his personality sometimes overshadowed his genius. When he was drinking (roughly, from 1919 to 1954), he was notorious for picking fights with whoever had the bad luck to be standing at the other end of a bar. Sobriety curbed his temper, but not his violent yearning for recognition or his self-punishing snobbery. In later life, O’Hara still cadged matchbooks from clubs that wouldn’t have him as a member, and he demanded from his publishers not just high advances but also gifts and lunches at the Ritz. He was addicted to the tokens of success. O’Hara spent particular energy lobbying Yale for an honorary degree, in vain: as then president Kingman Brewster explained, “He wanted it too much.”

Yale comes up a lot in BUtterfield 8 and in much of O’Hara’s later fiction. It was a sort of obsession of his. (Ernest Hemingway once took up a collection “to send O’Hara to New Haven”: O’Hara was in his thirties at the time.) To his lasting chagrin, he never attended college. When he was still in high school, his father died suddenly, leaving the family penniless. From the time he was a teenager, O’Hara supported himself with his typewriter, first as a reporter in Pennsylvania, then in New York, later by writing fiction. Over the years he published 247 stories in The New Yorker (still a record) and a string of best sellers, but he never got over the change in his family’s fortunes, for the O’Haras had lived well when he was a boy, and he never stopped feeling locked out of the upper class. He was morbidly conscious of being Irish American. As his alter ego in BUtterfield 8, the beat reporter Jimmy Malloy explains to the debutante Isabel Stannard: “I am a Mick. I wear Brooks clothes and I don’t eat salad with a spoon and I could probably play five-goal polo in two years, but I am a Mick. Still a Mick … The people who think I am a Yale man aren’t very observing about people.” For O’Hara, this was an ultimate condemnation, both of the unobserving people and of himself.

Stephen Mertz is best known for his
mainstream thrillers and novels of suspense. His work covers a wide variety of
styles from paranormal dark suspense (Night
Wind and Devil
Creek) to historical thrillers (Hank
& Muddy), hardboiled noir (Fade
to Tomorrow) and even over-the-top steampunk (Sherlock Holmes: Zombies Over London). He is the creator of the
popular Blaze! western series,
written in collaboration with others, published by Rough Edges Press.

Steve has traveled widely
and is a U.S. Army veteran. He presently lives in the American Southwest, and
he is always at work on a new book.

PRO FILE:

Tell us about
your current book.

I’m proud of
this one. The King of Horror & Other
Stories is a complete collection of my short fiction, with an Introduction
by Evan Lewis and a new afterword by me. Oh, and one new story never before
published.

2. Can you give a sense of what you're working on now?

I keep coming back to a novel I can’t seem to finish about
Jimi Hendrix.

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

Writing. Knowing writers. Reading.

4. What is the greatest DISpleasure?

Bad writing.

5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world,
what is it?

This may surprise you but I don’t have any advice for them.
This is probably the best time to be a writer since I broke in as a writer. The
so-called legacy houses and agencies got what they deserved and, one hopes, are
in the process of realigning with the new publishing paradigm, and the digital
publishing world is an explosion of markets unseen since the birth of
television and the paperback original. I’m old school enough to prefer “real”
books as a reader, but my writing revenue these days comes from my e-publishers,
Crossroads Press and Rough Edges Press. I’m writing what I want to write.
People are reading what I’m writing, and seem to like it. Revenue is being
generated. More of the same, please!

6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like
to seein print
again?

There should be more Ennis Willie available! When it
comes to hardboiled, he’s the best “unknown” there is.

7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never
forgetthat moment.

Some Die Hard.
Just re-published by Rough Edges Press with a new afterword by me recounting
how I managed to finagle my money out of the original publisher (crooked
bastards) with the help of a mime and…well, heck, buy the book! It’s still the only locked room mystery I
ever heard of where a guy is murdered with a knife while flying alone in his
glider…

"One of my favorite writers...a born storyteller...Enjoy!" – Max Allan Collins "Stephen Mertz writes a hard-edged, fast-paced thriller for those who like their tales straight and sharp." — Joe R. Lansdale For the past forty years, Stephen Mertz has been a bestselling author of thrillers and men's adventure novels, while also becoming known as one of the best mystery writers in the business. THE KING OF HORROR & OTHER STORIES, the complete collection of his short fiction, showcases the wide variety of his work, from Westerns and historicals to hardboiled private eye yarns to pure pulp adventure and razor-sharp suspense. Featuring an introduction by Evan Lewis and an afterword by Stephen Mertz, the stories in this volume include: The King of Horror The Death Blues Fragged Talon's Gift The Lizard Men of Blood River The Busy Corpse Take Two The Basics of Murder The Dark of Midnight Last Stand A Hit for the New Age Relic Rough Edges Press is proud to present THE KING OF HORROR & OTHER STORIES.

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Ed here: As I've noted before I never really took to James Bond in print or in the movies probably because I've never been fan of camp. That JFK took to him always disappointed me. It revealed the privilege that informed too much of his life. Personal opinion only of course.

Matt Helm was much closer to the real deal. Allan Dulles, the most sociopathic of all our Cold Warrior political psychopaths would probably have built a shrine to Helm. Which is to say that Helm was a true blue Cold Warrior himself, so certain in his job of destroying Communism that assassinating people rarely troubled him morally.

But Hamilton was so skilled in presenting him, so deft at making Helm's war our own, that we at least understood him if not always agreed with him. The novels remain fresh today and given Putin's recent sociopathic moves) even the Cold War atmospherics are once again realistic.

Unlike all the writers influenced by Ian Fleming and other upper crust British espionage novelists, Matt Helm is very much blue collar. Parts of his books set in the American west read like early Elmore Leonard westerns. Like most workingmen and workingwomen, he knows how to do stuff, whether it's fixing the hinges on a door getting an obstinate car to start.

They are nodal available again beautiful inexpensive editions. Buy them now.

Allyson Longueira is publisher of WMG Publishing. She is an award-winning writer, editor and designer.

I’ve told you how busy Dean Wesley Smith keeps himself. And this month is no different. But this time, I’m talking about nonfiction (yeah, he writes that, too). He has two new nonfiction books coming out—one tomorrow and one as part of the NaNoWriMo Storybundle on October 28—and hasn’t slowed down yet.

In the first book, Stages of a Fiction Writer, Dean shares his vast experience and observations on the various phases a fiction writer goes through as he or she evolves in the craft.

Here’s the synopsis:

With more than a hundred published novels and more than seventeen million copies of his books in print, USA Todaybestselling author Dean Wesley Smith knows how to write fiction. And he has traversed every stage of writing along the way.

In this WMG Writer’s Guide, Dean takes you step-by-step through the stages most fiction writers go through and how not to lose hope along the way.

Want to enjoy your writing more and let your storytelling evolve in its own time? Then learn from Dean’s experience and discover what to expect at each stage of a fiction writer’s career.

In the second book, How to Write Fiction Sales Copy, Dean takes all those blurbs from the 32 stories he wrote for Stories from July and analyzes what approach he took to creating the blurb as well as what makes for good sales copy writing.

Here’s the synopsis:

USA Today bestselling author and former publisher Dean Wesley Smith knows how to navigate the complicated world of publishing. And now, he shares his experience to help writers tackle the most challenging writing of all: Fiction Sales Copy.

In this WMG Writer’s Guide, Dean addresses the major challenges that lead to bad sales copy—including using passive voice and too much plot—and offers 32 examples from his own stories to illustrate his points.

Want to make your books stand out from the pack and grab the reader’s attention? Then learn from Dean’s experience and discover how to write copy that best sells your stories.

Dean offers a unique perspective in the world of writing how-to, and his blog draws thousands of visitors weekly. Erin M. Hartshorn, of Vision: A Resource for Writers, says:“Dean Wesley Smith’s blog gives both a slightly different view of the publishing world than I’d seen before and detailed hands-on ‘here’s how to get from A to B’ instruction.”

So, if you want to improve your fiction writing or just understand the process writers go through a little better, check out these books.

Happy writing.

Allyson Longueira is publisher of WMG Publishing. She is an award-winning writer, editor and designer.